Dr. Nitin Agarwal Writes on AI Deepfakes in ACDS Guest Column
The Arkansas Center for Data Sciences (ACDS) recently published a guest column by COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal. ACDS is a nonprofit that seeks to support IT professionals and further industry knowledge. For example, ACDS organizes data science events, employs apprenticeships and internships, and helps IT employers and employees find each other. In his guest column, Dr. Agarwal addresses the danger of deepfakes and AI-amplified propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. As he describes in one excerpt, “Let’s say someone has an image of your face plus samples of your voice from your public appearances and speeches. Those speeches can be used to train the model to speak a new script, in your voice and with your inflections, and the video can be displayed on top of that newly created voice. It appears now like you have said those very words, which you have not.”
ParSocial 2024: Speeding Up Social Computing!
The IEEE Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing for Computational Social Systems (ParSocial) serves as a platform bringing together researchers from interdisciplinary areas of computer science, social sciences, applied mathematics, and engineering to further research on parallel and distributed processing, computational modeling, and high-performance computing in the discipline of social computing.
At the end of May 2024, the 8th ParSocial conference will be held in San Francisco, California. There Mert Can Cakmak and Dr. Nitin Agarwal will present their research titled “High-Speed Transcript Collection on Multimedia Platforms: Advancing Social Media Research through Parallel Processing.”
Smart Media 2024: Navigating the Modalities of YouTube Videos
The International Conference on Smart Multimedia hosts research and oral presentations on a variety of topics concerned with multimedia applications. This conference contains a significant range of topics, such as:
- Speech, audio, image, video, and text media processing
- Multimedia communication
- Haptic intelligence
- Security and content protection
- Multimedia trends
- Multi-modal integration
Research Spotlight: Emotion Assessment of YouTube Videos using Color Theory
In this month’s research spotlight, COSMOS highlights two studies both recently accepted to the 9th International Conference on Multimedia and Image Processing (ICMIP) at Tokyo, Japan. At ICMIP 2024, cosmographers Mert Can Cakmak, Mainuddin Shaik, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal will present their paper titled “Emotion Assessment of YouTube Videos using Color Theory,” and Niloofar Yousefi, Mert Can Cakmak, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal will also present another paper titled “Examining Multimodal Emotion Assessment and Resonance with Audience on YouTube.” Both studies use color theory to analyze the emotions in video datasets.
Cosmographer Corner: Former Cosmographer, Dr. Serpil Tokdemir, joins Arkansas Department of Veteran Affairs as CIO
COSMOS, in this inaugural edition of Cosmographer Corner, highlights the work of past UALR graduate and Cosmographer Serpil Tokdemir. Tokdemir—who is now the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Arkansas Department of Veteran Affairs—started her doctoral career as a COSMOS researcher during its inception. She received her Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences in 2015, and went on to be a postdoctoral fellow at COSMOS. We interviewed Dr. Tokdemir on where her career is now and what her work at COSMOS entailed.
2023 Student Writing Awards: Applying Rhetorical and Writing Skills in COSMOS Conference Papers
We are proud to announce an accomplishment for Cosmographer Tenzing Briggs, who in the past month was awarded the Technical and Workplace Writing Award from the Rhetoric & Writing Department’s for the 2023 Student Writing Awards.
The work that received the award was a style guide for Katog Choling, a religious nonprofit Buddhist center in Northeast Arkansas, created for the Fall 2022 Technical Writing and Editing course taught by Dr. Cynthia Nahrwold. In the cover letter of the style guide submitted for the 2023 Awards, Tenzing explains the challenges that come with creating such an organization’s style guide.